Belgium: Empire Poverty

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From South to North. Although Eyskens' proposals were eminently sensible, few would listen. For the squabble somehow had touched off the deep, complex disputes that have plagued the nation for years. Once again the French-speaking Walloon southerners, who played a big role in forcing Leopold III to abdicate ten years ago, were up in arms against their cultural rivals of the north, the Flemish, and were taking it out on Flemish Premier Eyskens. Once again the deep clerical and anticlerical feud was out in the open; the Roman Catholic Church openly opposed the strike, and the big Catholic trade union group refused to join it; bitterly, the anticlericals hung Belgium's Catholic primate in effigy in some southern towns.

Socialist leaders were glad to capitalize on the nation's deep division. When the strikers' spirits flagged, Socialist leaders called a series of nationwide meetings urging workers to stay away from their jobs until the law was withdrawn. The strikes spread to the less industrial Flemish north. Bruges, the "Venice of the North," closed up for the day, and the docks at Antwerp, one of Western Europe's biggest ports, were paralyzed. At Mons 15,000 strikers held a mass rally, and all 60,000 workers at the big steel plants in Liege took the day off to march through the streets, were joined by the city's miners and chemical industry workers.

"I have not seen a strike of this intensity since 1923," said the burly boss of the Liege steelworkers, Robert Lampion, adding ominously, "We have no financial problem. We can keep this up longer than the government can . . . We have been accused of irresponsibility, but who is more irresponsible? The threatened workers or Parliament, away on its vacation—or the first citizen of the kingdom, away on his honeymoon?" Hurrying Home. It was not the first caustic comment on the fact that, in Belgium's time of crisis, young King Baudouin and Fabiola, his bride of a fortnight, were honeymooning in sunny Spain.

Premier Eyskens advised the palace that the King should not cut short his honeymoon, because to do so would be a confession that the strike wave was expected to get worse, not better, as the government had been insisting. But when word got through to Seville that the Socialists were planning a mass march of 50,000 strikers in Brussels, 30-year-old King Baudouin and his bride boarded a waiting Belgian air force transport and hurried home to Laeken Palace.* While the King was still in the air, a column of demonstrators 16 abreast with locked arms began a slow march from Socialist Party headquarters toward the heavily guarded zone around the Parliament building, the Premier's office and the palace. Troops, rushed in from NATO garrisons in West Germany, waited grimly with rifles at the ready; mounted gendarmes drew sabers. Then at the last minute, the crisis subsided; the mob lost its nerve, veered away from the official area, chose instead a path through the center of the city. Many of the marchers carried stones and iron bolts, hurling them at plate-glass windows of banks and shops that had dared to remain open through the strike.